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Fri 22 Mar, 2013 11:12 pm
Ten years after the invasion of Iraq there have been numerous opinion pieces written relative to what its end results have been and whether or not they can be said to have been worth their cost.
The opinions seem to fall into four general categories:
1) "I knew it was a travesty, never supported it, and it's obvious it was a bad an action as I thought it to be."
2) " I knew it was a travesty (even though I supported it but now say I didn't) and it was as bad an action as I thought it was (but didn't have the guts to say at first)."
3) "I thought it was a good idea, I supported it, but now I see it was, overall, a mistake."
4) "It didn't turn out as well as I hoped it would but it was still a good try."
I find myself subscribing to the 3rd view.
From the perspective of execution the strategy behind the Iraqi war was a terrible failure. Although Donald Rumsfeld and his supporters in the Administration were the architects of the failure of execution, I blame George Bush, if for no other reason than he was the President.
Every president listens to advisors and perhaps Rumsfeld was particularly persuasive. Hindsight, as they say is 20/20, and perhaps even the plans promoted by Rumsfeld might have been viable under a different set of circumstances. However, it didn't take very long to realize that they were not, or they were being horribly executed, and yet Bush stood by Rumsfeld beyond the recognition point. There's really no excuse for that, and arguments that his admirable sense of loyalty caused him to stick with Rumsfeld longer than perhaps he should have don't cut it since his loyalty was owed more to the members of our armed services than his Secretary of Defense.
In any case, it wasn't simply a failure of execution, it was first and foremost a failure of strategy. There never really was any reason to believe that the US government and/or military would be able to execute a strategy that was fundamentally one of nation building, and a strategy that cannot work is a failure at the outset.
There are two, and perhaps only two, examples of American success in nation building: Japan and Germany. Rebuilding a destroyed enemy nation is wise strateg, however, the US didn't go to war with Japan or Germany with the underlying goal of rebuilding their nations; transforming them into some semblence of allies or democratice beacons. The US went to war with Japan and Germany to destroy them, and the fact that it and allies were so successful in their destructive goal made successful nation building possible.
That nation building was the primary goal of the Iraq War and a very close secondary goal of the Afghan War made it virtually impossible to adopt a goal of the destruction of either, and so any goal of nation building was doomed from the very start.
The US should not go to war unless it has the capability and, more importantly, the will to destroy it's enemies. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, this was effectively achieved. At that point we should have pulled out since it wasn't necessary to destroy either nation to defeat our enemies, and without effectively destroying these two nations, rebuilding wasn't going to happen.
We should have pulled out with the clearly expressed message that should either nation allow our enemies to reconstitute themselves to the point where we perceived a renewed threat, we would return to again destroy them and this time it would likely require destroying the nations in which they resided.
In the end we might successfully rebuild them, but I doubt any people want to pay that price to achieve modernity and an eventually powerful economy.
I hope that what we have learned from Iraq is the ultimate failure promised by foreign policy based on military intervention and the hubris of nation building. We've lost far more American lives in the efforts to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan than we did in defeating our enemies, and we have failed as respects the former and by doing so, made the latter less lasting.
The American people, rightly or wrongly, support our military in its efforts to defeat whomever our government has defined as the enemy; especially if we do it quickly and with perceived minimal loss of American lives. In most cases we can meet these expectations.
@Finn dAbuzz,
I was a modified version of number 3. I first supported it but, shortly after the war began, the evidence used by the administration (especially aerial photos) were studied a mite closer by several centers . I was working a roject and had an office near Mahwa NJ where we were doing aerial recon of a mine location. We studied several of the air photos that were made available. These were not great resolution but were clear enough to cause a collective WTF?. Then SCott Ritter (who was among the first of the real whistle blowers) was being lambastedverbally by the mouthpieces of the amdin and several of their toadie papers like the WSJ. Turns out that SCott was 100% right .
It was enough to call attention to the fact that we were being scammed by a cynical foreign policy.
I wish that more of our kids would have refused togo and would have chosen prison time. As it turned out they would now be freed and would have very good civil cases against the members of the Administration.
@Finn dAbuzz,
S far as I know, there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.
Number one, and the evidence for it is here at this site. Anyone familiar with (the now possibly defunct) Project for a New American Century shouldn't have been fooled. The PNAC, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, "Scooter" Libby, Perle, Abrams, Armitage and a host of others among the so-called neo-cons, many of them members of Bush's administration, was calling for an invasion of Iraq even before Bush was a candidate for the White House. They had all these grand militaristic solutions to what they saw as the world's problems, and had almost no negotiating or diplomatic solutions to offer. As early as 1997 they wrote to Clinton to urge an invasion of Iraq. Before the invasion, intelligent men and women with "insider" knowledge of the situation were denying the WoMD allegations and any connection between Hussein and the 11th of September. Hell, during the second gulf war, when bin Laden was still our good buddy, he was offering to send in hit teams to take out Hussein.
One of our rightwingnuts here was constantly referring to "prominent Iraqi defectors" (as though they were equivalent to the Soviets). That would have been the Iraqi National Congress, and in particular Ahmed Chalabi, all of them self-interested in the overthrow of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party and Hussein. The American people were sold a pretty flimsy tissue of lies.
One of the worst cases of collective ignorance and blind devotion in our nation's history.
For anyone interested in who around here was saying what
before the invasion of Iraq, i recommend
Walter Hinteler's Anti-War Movement thread, the "ur-thread" for the long running series of "The US, the UN and Iraq" threads. It was started on October 22, 2002.
I don't expect many people will be surprised to hear that my position is very firmly number (1). I don't feel that it was a good idea badly executed. It was an act of criminal folly justified by deceit and lies.
@contrex,
No, it was a bad idea badly executed. I wouldn't trust Donald Rumsfeld to run a boy scout troop.
Rummy and his good buddy Saddam Hussein in 1983.
@Finn dAbuzz,
Finn dAbuzz wrote:There are two, and perhaps only two, examples of American success in nation building: Japan and Germany.
I can't speak about Japan.
But where I live, in Germany, the nation had been there already.
And after WWII, we were 'formed' by an 'English model' in many perspectives.
(The American Zone was about 20 km away, the Russian about 120 km and the French about 400 km - people there certainly had different experiences.)
@Walter Hinteler,
dont think that most Americans were really that well informed or actually gave much thought to Iraq until these items running up to the war were occuring. I recall the "Aluminum tubes" issue where 1 (and only one) scientist had come out saying that the Al tubes were waay to bulkiy and poorly machined. (I dont think anyne here had the experience in centrifuging UF6 so that was a no starter.
The contracts for Yellowcake were another item that were quickly debunked but not made widely public (or they were argued by the Admin reps)
However, the aeiral photos of non chemical facilities and ordinary petro-crackers and chemical distillation units, no halogen lines .
I gave Bush the benefit of doubt because, as an offended paryy after 9/11, I was a fan of settling up with the bastards that did it to us in whatever way necessary.
Too bad that 9/11 became just another opportunity for evil jingoistic policies that required us to go in and destroy another nation.
Theres so much that I missed in the runup that its sad how Ive become a suspicious member of the constituency.
Ive got no excuse for bveing duped
@Walter Hinteler,
On May 8, 1945, there have been 3.4 million US-soldiers in all Europe, out of this number 1.6 million in Germany.
In December 1945, the number of US-American soldiers in all European countries was 600,000. This number was reduced to 200,000 in 1946. And in 1949, there weren't a lot more than 100,000 US-soldiers in all Europe (mainly in Germany). In 1956, the number rose again to 360,000.
@farmerman,
There was definitely a media blitz on. Bush kept his skirts clean while Cheney went around saying such things as that we knew what "palm tree they're parked under," which, of course, was bullshit. Cheney made the extravagant claims, and Bush whistled and walked around with his hands in his pockets, establishing plausible deniability.
Hans Blix was saying no evidence of WoMD in Iraq, so the administration set out to discredit him. When Italian intelligence passed on a report, via British intelligence, that Iraq had inked a deal for yellow cake uranium from Nigeria, the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to about a half dozen African nations (he was fluent in French) to investigate. He said the report was completely without foundation. The administration hushed that one up, and when, after the invasion, Wilson stepped up to say that he had debunked the yellow cake story before the invasion, they couldn't get at him, so they went after his wife, Valerie Plame. Libby, a founding member of PNAC and Cheney's hatchet man, outed her as a CIA agent.
You really didn't want to get in the way of the neo-cons at the beginning of this century.
@Setanta,
If, as it really happened, thgat the Yellow CAke Contracts were all frauds. WHO did the Photoshop work, and why?
If it all comes back to something in the admin, then we havent finished sweeping the house IMHO.
@farmerman,
Oh, i agree that we haven't. I think it's telling that the administration didn't try to discredit Joseph Wilson, and instead attacked his wife. To me, that suggests that they knew they couldn't discredit Wilson, and that their intelligence was unreliable.
If you read the report of the 9-11 commission, you'll see that Wolfowitz attempted to get an "invade Iraq" movement going at Camp David in the days after September 11th, but according to the testimony of Condalisa Rice, Rummy shut him down right away. So the invade Iraq plans of the administration were cooked up sometime after the invasion of Afghanistan, and i think that Cheney, being more subtle than Wolfowitz, worked on Bush over the period of a year until he had him convinced.
By the way, i usually avoid Finn's threads, because i consider most of them to be exercises in straw man attacks on those he considers to be "liberals." However, this is an important subject on a "lest we forget" basis. I'll bet that to this day, most Americans still don't know just how easily they were hoodwinked.
If we remember back when the senior Bush was President, and he got Iraq to get out of Kuwait, Iraq decided to vent some of their venom on an innocent bystander, Israel, by shooting Scud missiles into Israel. Now, it is my opinion, that Israel might not have been willing to accept another President's request to "bite the bullet," so to speak, and not retaliate, if Iraq in the future decided to scapegoat Israel again. So, if nothing else, in my opinion, getting rid of the old regime in Iraq might have prevented a much larger conflagration at a later date. Even without yellow cake, or whatever.
If there is any correctness in the above analysis, and it was in the minds of those that make decisions, there is no reason to believe that the invasion of Iraq also benefitted other parties. And, we little chickens might be quite naive to think that we get the "real" reasons for actions, since this country is quite divided in our willingness to do anything militarily, especially when it comes to Israel. Not that Israel wouldn't have done the job themselves, if needed, in my opinion, but for posterity western powers may have already decided it is not wise, for a balance of power, too have Israel flexing her muscles too much?
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Ive got no excuse for bveing duped
It's big of you to say that Fm, but you do have an excuse. The American media was so enthusiastically in favour of the war that they broadcast dodgy information as fact, and ignored evidence to the contrary, including anti war demonstations in America.
If you weren't in favour of war you were portrayed as anti-American, and I understand why people would be not want to be classed as traitors.
I was against the war from the off.
@izzythepush,
I really had my head-down for about a decade and a half. I was busy with my business, teaching, and marketing that things like my kids birthdays would have gone uncelebrated if it werent for my wife "making believe" I had hands in all he parties and gifts. So,(and Im not making an excuse here [but I guess I am]) not paying attention to everyday and politics was never something I missed and with 9/11 I suppose I was a bit more of a chicken Hawk than I am today
When 9/11 came, I had 2 previous (and very missed) employees who left my employ to join a big environmental management company . They had offices waaay up in the WTC. They didnt make it and I had a senmse of guiltabout it for not trying to offer them more to stay.
SO, I was in favor of Afghanistan and never gave detailed scrutiny to "the runnup". When NYT printed a story that reeked of supportive journalism in 2002, I was not very critical at all. AND I HAD the techy knowledge to look at nuke enrichment yet I never, EVER asked the question about
1If Saddam was really enriching U235, WHERE were the plants making the Uranium Hexaflouride? In the US we had several support facilities and we travel across the states to make bombs..
I never asked the questions till we had to meet at Mawha NJ, ((because the WTC meeting place wasnt there anymore). AT that time we had shared some memos with a coupla colleagues who questioned Powells air photos. AFter that, everything fell into place,
@izzythepush,
This was only partly true. If one really checked available sources you could see it was bs. The problem was that citizens dident bother checking beyound the popular news services. In other words we were brainwashed just as throughly as any of the communist countries by our government and our media.
There was plenty of slack-jawed credulity to go around. When the PM told the Commons with a straight face that the Iraqis could launch missiles with WoMD warheads with only 45 minutes notice, there were plenty of fools in the UK who bought that bullshit. More than anything else, it depended on the reaction of government leadership. You didn't see that kind of credulity from the French or the Germans.
@Setanta,
well, trhe French were more responsible for any portion of the Iraqi nuclear power industry and the supply of all the fissionable material. Well, the US was busy disconnecting from anything French about that time.
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